Because they all lived on an island That rose up from the sea And everybody on the island Was somebody from TV. And there was a beautiful view But nobody could see. Cause everybody on the island Was screaming Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Why? -- Laurie Anderson 1986 Some of the rumblings that people are reporting on, are just different conversations that have happened, but there's really nothing new to talk about there -- Mark Zuckerberg 2009
I really love this stuff but..........
The web is a low cost, low entry barrier medium. Special delivery junk mail. People who try to get off of email spammers' lists spend their increasingly free time hunting down conventional wisdom on the web. And what they find is more often than not a cut-and-paste version of yesterday's conventional wisdom.
Blogs allow comments - see the button and the little box? But interaction is rare. Most comments go uncommented - because we're not talking about a conversations here. That's not what blogging is about. Most posts are diatribes (perhaps monotribe is a better word), somewhere between op-ed and dear diary. Pulitzer class "monotribers" are fine. But there are few of them and fewer still on the web...and few Tolstoys as well.
On Facebook, interaction is between the author and the author. Social networking is social climbing. Friends paste themselves like graffiti on the pages of screaming souls, hoping for a ride to notoriety. Facebook is a community of egotists.
Unfortunately, social interaction and tagging is not the wisdom of the mob, it's the distillation of sentiment into efficient narratives that can be marketed back to the mob at lowest possible cost.
Lately, when talking with friends, I find myself listening to intermingled threads and passions from the blogosphere. Each one is familiar ... because it came from the same place as the previous one. And the source of origin is one of many that grew like kudzu from some primordial permalink.
Go read a book. Talk to me about music.
So that's my monotribe. No regrets. No tags. Comments welcome.
